The Earl of Argyle, and others, made an attempt 1685, and though their quarrel was not altogether stated according to the antient plea of the Scottish covenanters; yet they came to rescue the nations from popery, slavery and bloody persecution; but being broke, and several of his officers and men taken, the gallant col. R——d Rumbol of Rye-house fled westward, and would it is thought have extricated himself of the enemy, had not a number of cruel country men risen, and (after a gallant resistance) taken him, west from Lismahagow, in the head of Dalsyrf or Glassford parish. Nay, it is said, they were so cruel that, while defending himself against three in number, having turned his horse with his back to a stone gavel, one of them came with a corn fork and put it behind his ear, and turned off his head-piece; to whom he said, "O cruel country man! that used me thus, when my face was to mine enemy." However, he was by them taken to Edinburgh, and from the bar to the scaffold, drawn up on a gibbet, then let down a little, and his heart taken out by the executioner while alive, and held out on the point of a bayonet, and then thrown into a fire; his body quartered, and placed on the public places of the nation.—But let us hear what became of these ungrateful wretches, who thus used and apprehended him who had ventured his life to deliver them from cruel bondage. Few of them died a natural death.
Mark Ker, one of the principal actors, and who was said to wound him after he was taken, and who it is said got his sword, was afterwards killed on a summer evening at his own door, (or run through by the same sword), by two young men who called themselves col. Rumbol's sons, and who, it is said, went off without so much as a dog's moving his tongue against them, &c.
George Mair, being abroad, when returning, wandered and fell over Craignethen craigs, got some of his limbs broke, and stuck in a thicket, and when found next day was speechless, and so died in that condition.
One —— Wilson was killed by the fall of a loft. Another in Hamilton (commonly called the long lad of the Nethertoun) got his leg broken, which no physician could cure, and so corrupted that scarce any person for the stink could come near him, &c.
—— Weir of Birkwood fell from his horse, and was killed; and his son not many years ago, was killed by a fall down a stair in drink after a dregy.
Gavin Hamilton who got his buff coat, (out of which Rumbol's blood could by no means be washed) lived a good while after a wicked and vicious life, yet his name and memorial is become extinct, and the place of his habitation is razed out, and become a plain field.—M. S.
But what needs more?—Examples of this kind are numerous. God has provided us with his wonderful works, both in mercy and judgment, to be had in everlasting remembrance,—that their ends may be answered, and that they may serve for a memorial of instruction and admonition to those on whom the end of the world is come.
The Lord is by the judgments known
which he himself hath wrought:
The sinners hands do make the snares
wherewith themselves are caught.
N. B. To the foregoing prodigies of wickedness, I intended to have added a number of examples of the same nature in England and elsewhere under the auspices of popery; but the Scots Worthies having swelled so far above expectation, to which this behoved to go as an Appendix as proposed, I was not only obliged to desist from my intended design in this, but even to contract or abridge my former transcript of these historical hints and omit several practical observations thereon, which might have been useful, or at least entertaining to the reader.—At the same time the reader is to observe, That all the authors are not named from whence they are collected, but only the most principal; nor are they to expect every circumstance in any one of these quoted in every example; for what is omitted by one author is observed by another; which rendered the knitting of such distant authors and variety of materials into such a small composition, a matter of some difficulty.
FINIS